US dominates, China second in Shanghai subject rankings

American universities dominate this year’s ShanghaiRanking’s Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, and appear on the published lists 3,857 times, taking 32 top positions in 52 subjects.

The top institution was Harvard University with 15 top spots, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT with five.

Chinese universities (including one in Hong Kong) came top in eight subjects and are presented on the league tables for a total of 1,652 times, just behind the United States, and surpassed the United Kingdom.

The third best performing country in terms of top positions was the Netherlands with five. It was followed by the UK with three, Singapore with two, and Belgium and Switzerland with one each.

The US took a clean sweep of top positions in medical sciences and social sciences, with Harvard taking four out of six top spots in the former and seven out of 14 in the latter.

“While the superb performance of American universities is seemingly expected, it is interesting to note the outstanding performance of universities from emerging countries, especially China,” said Dr Snow Wang, executive editor, Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, who is also ranking manager, ShanghaiRanking.

Harvard’s 15 top positions included the seven in social sciences subjects and four in medical sciences and two in life sciences and two in engineering.

MIT came top in four engineering subjects and another within natural sciences.

Other universities to top more than one subject ranking include Stanford University, University of California Berkeley, and University of Pennsylvania from the United States; the University of Oxford from the United Kingdom; Delft University of Technology and the Wageningen University from the Netherlands; and Nanyang Technological University from Singapore.

ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects or GRAS 2017 was released on 28 June by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy. It contains rankings of universities in 52 subjects across natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, medical sciences and social sciences. In total, more than 4,000 universities were ranked.

On the lists of ShanghaiRanking’s Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, more than 1,400 universities from 80 countries are presented for a total of 14,400 times.

Russian commentators were claiming a “major breakthrough” after five Russian universities made it into the top 100 of a subject, four of which were in the top 100 for the first time.

For example, National Research University Higher School of Economics entered the hot 100's top 51-75 group in ‘sociology’. National University of Science and Technology MISiS broke into the world's top 100 universities in ‘metallurgical engineering’. Both are Russian Academic Excellence Project 5-100 participants.

Olga Vasilyeva, minister of education and science of the Russian Federation, said: “Twelve Russian universities entered into the ranking for the first time, eight of them Project 5-100 participants.

“Particularly worth mentioning are achievements in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Hence, Russian universities demonstrate a high level of substantive training and research.”

ShanghaiRanking said subject rankings have “irreplaceable value”. After the first release of subject rankings in 2009, it took eight years to expand the subject rankings to cover 52 subjects, compared with five subjects ranked in 2009: mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science and economics/business.

These subject rankings adopted the methodology used in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, or ARWU, with minor changes. Since then ShanghaiRanking has been considering how to refine the methodology and expand the rankings to more subjects.

Substance and context

Dr Jan Sadlak, the president of IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, said subject rankings are particularly useful.

“Without diminishing importance of the organising framework represented by the university, academic disciplines provide substance and context in which both teaching and research is carried out,” he said.

“Particularly relevant in the context of rankings, is an argument that there is hardly an institution which can claim to perform equally well in teaching and research and in all academic disciplines and study programmes.”

Ying Cheng, CEO of ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, said the key feature of ShanghaiRanking's various lists is that “all the measures are objective, which distinguishes ARWU and GRAS from other rankings with respect to transparency, understandability and reliability”.

In Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2017, academic leaders from the world’s top 100 universities were invited to engage in the process of developing two of ShanghaiRanking’s indicators – academic awards and top journals. The results highlight 27 top awards from 19 subjects, and 94 top journals from 33 subjects. Data for more than 4,000 universities in these 52 subjects were collected and evaluated.